1. Field of the Invention
Implementations described herein relate generally to information retrieval and, more particularly, to using boundaries associated with a given map view for retrieving the location of businesses located within the boundaries of the map view.
2. Description of Related Art
The World Wide Web (“web”) contains a vast amount of information. Locating a desired portion of the information, however, can be challenging. This problem is compounded because the amount of information on the web and the number of new users inexperienced at web searching are growing rapidly.
Search engines attempt to return hyperlinks to web pages in which a user is interested. Generally, search engines base their determination of the user's interest on search terms (called a search query) entered by the user. The goal of the search engine is to provide links to high quality, relevant results (e.g., web pages) to the user based on the search query. Typically, the search engine accomplishes this by matching the terms in the search query to a corpus of pre-stored web pages (e.g., using an index). Web pages that contain the user's search terms are considered “hits” and are returned to the user as links.
Local search engines are search engines that attempt to return relevant web pages and/or business listings within a certain distance of a specific geographic location. For a local search, a user may enter a search query and may specify a geographic location around which the search query is to be performed. The local search engine may return relevant results, such as relevant web pages pertaining to the geographic area or listings of businesses that are located within a certain distance of a center of the specified geographic location. For example, if one searches for restaurants in the San Franciso Bay area using an existing graphical map search interface (e.g., a local search using Google Maps) only the most relevant restaurants within a certain distance of the very center point of the map will be provided to the searching user. The searching user, however, may find it more desirable to locate the most relevant restaurants over the entire area of the map displayed to the user, and not just those within a certain distance of the center point of the map.